


here's to the hearts that ache

by alljuststars (allthelight)



Category: Gallagher Girls Series - Ally Carter
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:55:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24099187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthelight/pseuds/alljuststars
Summary: '“You not gonna scold me? Tell me I’m being irresponsible?” She asks, waiting for some of the familiar derision to come from him. She thinks it would make her feel better.The corner of his mouth twitches slightly but he shakes his head. “No. I thought you could use a break.”'Sometimes it really just hurts. They find Matthew Morgan's grave and Abby doesn't know what to do with it. She just knows she can't do it alone.
Relationships: Abigail Cameron/Edward Townsend
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	here's to the hearts that ache

**Author's Note:**

> Did I reread all 6 books in 3 days last week? Yes.  
> Did I realise how much I really loved Abby/Townsend? Yes.   
> Do I know this is highly indulgent and possibly nobody will read it but I really just needed to write it and post it on the off-chance? Also yes. 
> 
> These books are like a hug to me and if at least one person enjoys this then it's good enough for me. Enjoy!

The stone house is quiet, every sound echoes off the wall and bounces around the dark night. The girls and Zach are sleeping, Abby knows because she’s checked on them about seven times since they fell asleep, all curled around each other as if they can protect each other from the next again day. The CIA team left hours ago, and it means that there’s only one person who would still be awake now to be making noise, gentle footsteps coming up behind her as she sits at the front door, staring out into the night.

“You should get some sleep” Townsend tells her, his voice still uncharacteristically soft. “We have to leave in a couple of hours.”

Yes. A couple of hours to catch a plane to go back to the Academy and tell Rachel, tell everyone, what they’ve found. She doesn’t think she can stomach it.

“I can’t,” she says, voice flat. There’s no energy for anything else. “I won’t. There’s no point in trying.”

He usually scoffs at her for her stubbornness, and she likes it that way, usually. Instead he sits down on the stone step next to her and she shuffles slightly to make room.

“You not gonna scold me? Tell me I’m being irresponsible?” She asks, waiting for some of the familiar derision to come from him. She thinks it would make her feel better.

The corner of his mouth twitches slightly but he shakes his head. “No. I thought you could use a break.”

Edward Townsend doesn’t give ‘breaks’. He isn’t the type of man. You’re either strong enough to take it or you aren’t. Today, however, he has made an exception and it means it must be especially bad for even him to see it. She’s been trying to convince herself that it isn’t, that they knew something like this had to happen eventually. But he put his hand on hers and her cheek against his and told Cam he was sorry and she knows that today, like a lot she’s experienced lately, is about as bad as it can get.

“Are the kids okay?”

He gives her a long look, as if wanting to tell her that they aren’t kids, not anymore. That they haven’t been in a long time. That today has taken the last of any innocent illusions they may have had about the lives they have chosen to lead. Spies don’t always get to come home. That’s just part of the deal.

But he doesn’t say what she already knows. He just nods. “Yes. They’re still sleeping.”

“Are you sure? You know what they’re like for running away. Especially Cam sleepwalking and after today I-”

“Abigail.” Townsend’s tone is hard, slicing right through her rambling. “I checked on them thirty seconds before I came here. They’re sleeping. This door is the only exit.”

She frowns. “No it isn’t. There’s a back door.”

There’s a slightly uncomfortable grin on his face and if she wasn’t feeling so utterly done, she might fall about laughing. Edward Townsend, a member of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, has done the unthinkable and booby-trapped the door. She thinks she could love him for it.

“Well well well,” she manages. “Will wonders never cease.”

“It’s a one-time deal, Abigail,’ he warns, but there’s a smile in his voice. “Just for today.” And then it disappears. “We don’t need to lose anybody else.”

But what he means is _You don’t need to lose anybody else_ and she’s endlessly grateful that he doesn’t say it.

The mountain around them is dark and the only light is their own, nothing can be seen for miles, and yet she feels she could walk back to that grave with her eyes closed. He’s not there anymore, flown back home by a team of their own, but it doesn’t matter. For the rest of her life she’ll feel this place calling back to her, and maybe she deserves it.

If only she’d just gone to Rome…

“You can’t blame yourself,” Townsend says, voice cutting through her thoughts. She looks at him in surprise, but she doesn’t know why. He’s always been good at that, knowing what she’s thinking even before she does. He turns to her. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“If only I’d gone there, if I’d met him like he wanted me to. Maybe we wouldn’t be here now.”

“No, maybe we wouldn’t. Maybe I would be here with your sister, exhuming the bodies of not one but two CIA operatives, and explaining to your niece and her friends that yes, sometimes life really is that cruel.”

Tears fill her eyes. It stings, but only because it’s true. His voice has taken on that insistent edge, the one it does when he’s a little bit afraid and trying not to show it. Not for the first time she wonders what he feels, what makes him scared. He’s a good spy, glass-empty, tight and proud, but still good. She’s known him for years, and knows it could take many more and she still wouldn’t figure it all out.

“I hate them,” she spits. “I really hate them. I hate _her._ ” Beside her Townsend tenses. “Who does that? Who tortures a seventeen-year-old kid?”

“She’s an operative to them. This is how it goes.”

“How can they do it?” She continues as if she hasn’t heard. “How can they do it to a kid?”

“The Circle recruits them at sixteen. Blackthorne takes twelve-year olds and turns them into assassins. You take twelve-year olds and turn them into spies.”

She rounds on him, rage a deliciously good distraction from the pit of misery she’s been wallowing in. “It’s different,” she growls, “and you know it. We don’t torture them. We teach them. I’d have thought even you would know the difference.”

“This isn’t a world for children, and yet you bring them into it and no matter how intelligent they are, no matter how _good_ they are, nobody can fully comprehend what kind of life they have chosen until something like _this_ happens.” He points inside the door. “That isn’t a bunch of highly skilled operatives in there, Abigail; that’s a group of scared children who have just seen what really happens when the other side wins.”

Abby thinks about the look in Cam’s eyes, the awful vacant look as her mind took her elsewhere. The fear in Bex’s eyes that her best friend may be gone forever, that older operatives with more experience may be lost to events such as this. The anger in Zach’s as he looked as though he wanted to hurt someone more than he had ever wanted to hurt someone before. She knows the feeling.

Townsend’s right, or at least partly. From the moment they walk through the door they’re handed knowledge that could topple governments and technology that’s more classified than nuclear launch codes. And no matter what they’re taught, no matter how many times they’re told the consequences, a spy’s life is always glamourous to them until they graduate and leave the protection of the school and see what it’s like in the real clandestine world.

“It’s about _choice,_ ” she says through gritted teeth. “A Gallagher girl can be an NSA code-breaker, or she can be a trash-collector. She can be anything she wants to be and nobody can make her do anything she doesn’t want to. That’s the whole damn point.”

He sighs heavily. “I know.” And it sounds like he does. “I’m sorry.” And it sounds like he is. “I didn’t want to fight.” But she knows that maybe he did, that he would provoke her into it just to make her feel something else.

“This isn’t supposed to happen,” she whispers. “They leave and they get jobs and maybe five years down the line they see action like this. A Gallagher girl at graduation is already more skilled than half of the other agents she works with.”

“I _know_. I’m sorry. It’s just – it’s hard to watch.”

Hard to watch what? The members of the Circle who can’t even legally drink yet are already manipulating elections? The Gallagher girls looking so excited and young in their P&E lessons and knowing that it won’t always be a fun game? The way Cam looks so confused everywhere she goes now, as though part of her is still gone and even she doesn’t know where it is? The CIA team digging bones out of the ground that had belonged to Matthew Morgan, a man who they had both worked with and admired? A man who was their friend?

“They tortured her,” Abby whispers. “They tortured Cammie and they killed Matt and they broke Rachel and they turned Joe. That’s just what they’ve done to my family, the people I care about. What else have they done? What else will they do?”

He says nothing and she’s glad for it.

“We were meant to protect Cammie and I thought we were, but she still ran. And then they got her.”

She’s aware of what she sounds like, and if they both didn’t know that the cupboards were empty then she wouldn’t blame him for thinking she was a little drunk. When she gets this upset her words tend to slur and her voice is slow and thick. She wonders if he’s forgotten that.

“She made a choice, Abigail.” Townsend moves a fraction of an inch towards her. “Something tells me you would have done the same thing in her position. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Wasn’t it?” She looks at him, tears in her eyes. “We were meant to make her feel safe, and clearly we didn’t. To you she might be some seventeen-year-old operative but she’s my niece. I don’t care how she was trained. It was our job, as her _family,_ to make her feel like we had her back and we didn’t do a good enough job of it. There’s nothing you can say that will ever make me feel any better about that.”

“Alright. I won’t.”

“I mean how sick do you have to be, really? How sick and twisted do you have to be to torture a person at their dad’s grave?” She shakes her head. “Finding out once was bad enough, I think twice would have killed me.”

“She’s here, Abigail. She’s alive.” He looks at her intensely. “It will be hard, but in time she will recover. Your school taught her well.”

“It’s not the point.” She’s so close to crying but she doesn’t want to, not in front of him. If she starts now she might never stop. “We all had this hope that he was still alive. Rach and I… we knew he wasn’t, but it was still there. But Cammie didn’t know what we knew and some part of her… I think she believed it when Catherine said they’d take her to him, that he really was alive all this time.”

“She asked me if I thought he was still alive.” Townsend’s voice is flat and even but she knows him, and she knows there’s something there. Every loss just adds more and more weight. One day they shall be buried under it. “I told her no.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Abby shakes her head. “Spy or not, she’s a kid who lost her dad. Sometimes you get to have it both ways. Sometimes that’s just the way it is.”

An animal howls somewhere down the mountain. The wind picks up slightly and moves the trees. Abby shivers, from cold or heartbreak she doesn’t know. She shifts even closer to Townsend and can feel the heat of his skin through his shirt. It makes her feel a bit warmer. At least she isn’t alone.

“How long have you been chasing them?”

He sighs. “Most of my career.”

“And does it ever get any easier? Are there ever any days where you think that there’s really no point?”

Edward Townsend is a proud man who avoids talking about his feelings the same way he avoids sugar. He’s also English. So, she’s not really expecting an answer to a question that he’s never been fond of answering in the past.

Except as a further testament to how truly awful the day is, he meets her eyes, and there’s an unsettling vulnerability in his. “Yes. All the time. And then a day like today happens and I’m reminded what the point of this job is, and why it’s so important that I do it.”

Yes, she understands that. She understands why they all do what they do. It’s why Rachel and Matthew were still active agents, even after they married and had Cammie. It’s why Rachel lets her daughter go to the school she does, and let her come on this mission, even though Abby knows she would have liked nothing more than to keep her in the school where she was safe. It’s why, even now, they still put one foot in front of the other and keep going on, even though they may want nothing more than to curl up in a ball on the ground and sleep forevermore.

“I need you to find her,” Abby says through gritted teeth. “I need you to find her, and when you do, I need you to kill her.”

He reaches out to her, brushes a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I promise you that I’ll try.”

“No, not just ‘try’, alright? It’s far too late for trying. You have to do it. You have to promise.”

“Abigail…”

She feels tears burning her eyes and a lump in her throat. “I mean it. You have to promise. You have to.” Her bottom lip trembles. “However you feel about her can’t possibly compare to how I feel about her right now.”

“I-”

“Promise me,” she tries to demand, but the tears have come now and the words are swept away. “Please. Please promise me.”

And then she’s sobbing and his arms are around her, holding her to him, and rubbing her back as he murmurs soft things into her hair. She sobs quietly so she doesn’t wake the kids, but she sobs _hard._ She sobs for Rachel, her big sister who carries the entire world on her shoulders and never lets anybody down. She sobs for Cammie, the kid who’s been through hell and has still come through it alive. She sobs for herself, because she feels like she let them all down and she’s used to being a fun aunt, but she can’t imagine ever smiling at anything again.

She doesn’t know how long she cries, but eventually she surfaces. His hands fall away from her almost reluctantly, but they both know this is how it has to be.

Abby drags her hands under her eyes, laughing thickly. “I must look like crap.”

Townsend’s eyes are impossibly blue. “That’s allowed.”

“Gee thanks.” She sighs. “It’s at times like this I wish I smoked.”

He laughs too, but his eyes are still soft. “Not a habit I’d recommend.”

“Did you-? Oh my God, I’ve finally seen it. Underneath your health freak persona you’re really just like the rest of us, aren’t you? Impossibly flawed.”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “I wouldn’t say impossibly.”

“No,” she shakes her head. “Neither would I.”

She feels better for crying, even if it had to be on Townsend. At least he smells nice and has soft shirts and his arms are as safe as she remembers. Now she feels she can face the world a little better. It gives her the strength to stand up and brush herself off and look back into the house.

“I’m gonna go get stuff ready so we can just leave. Gonna let the squirt and her friends sleep as long as they can. It’s a long day ahead of us.” She looks back at Edward, still sitting on the step and making no move to get off it. “Thanks. For just then and for earlier. I-it… I appreciate it.”

He nods, half-smiling. “Of course.”

She smiles back then and goes to walk away but before she can there’s a quiet ‘ _Abs’_ and she turns back to look at him, wondering how in half a second he could have gone from an assured operative to looking a lot younger and insecure.

“I didn’t- I haven’t forgotten about Buenos Aires.”

She feels her heart clench in her chest. “It would be okay. If you had.”

“No,” he shakes his head, looks down at his hands. “I won’t. I could never.”

She doesn’t know how to respond, because although she’s brought it up as a joke over these past few days, she never meant for anybody to actually call her out on it. It’s her way of coping. She didn’t think he’d take her seriously. Buenos Aires and what came after… none of that was a joke.

“It’s not like we were-” She stops suddenly, unable to say it. Memories flash through her head. She can taste the copper on her tongue.

“I know. I just needed to tell you.”

Her bottom lip begins to tremble again and her head feels heavy. They never talked about it. It happened and then it was over. Never once have they discussed how it changed their lives.

“I-”

“You don’t have to say anything, Abigail.”

It used to be different. He used to demand answers.

_What the bloody hell did you do that for?_

_Funny, I could ask you the same damn question._

_You should already know the answer to that._

_Yeah, well so should you!_

“I do.” She nods, tears burning in her eyes again. “Just not now, okay? I just can’t do it right now. Not today. Another time.”

His smile is small but genuine. “Another time.”

She smiles and goes to walk away but has to say, “I mean that, you know? I really do.”

“I know,” he says and there’s a look that passes between them that encompasses their entire history in one fleeting glance. It’s like going back in time. It doesn’t matter. He still turns away and then she goes, too. It’s just how they are. Not even today could change that.

But eventually, after packing and repacking and double-checking everything, she feels her eyelids grow heavy and she crawls onto a sofa, pulls a spare blanket up to her chest. 

She looks around for him and finds him still at the front door, barely a silhouette. He turns, catches her eye and nods solemnly. Then he turns back out, a silent, watchful guard against the night.


End file.
